Adjusting the Architecture: Arms Control, Disarmament, and Non-Proliferation in NATO

The purpose of this report is to analyze the role that arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation have played - and continue to play - in the security of the members of the Atlantic Alliance. These cooperative arrangements between states complement military strategies designed to deter, defend, and defeat adversaries by reducing force dispositions, technologies, and tactics that increase the perception, as well as the probability, that offensive military action will yield disproportionately beneficial outcomes.

The current architecture of agreements was designed to reduce the probability of Soviet-led aggression and became a means of stabilizing Russian control of its military capability in the post-Cold War era. Russian weakness, however, has strained these arrangements and NATO should re-orient them toward reducing the ability of states on the periphery of the Euro-Atlantic region to threaten the security of NATO members. Denmark could influence Alliance policy in this direction in NATO’s newly established Arms Control, Disarmament, and Non-Proliferation Committee (the ACDC) as an additional aspect of its activist foreign policy within an Alliance context.